Introduction

We should be very cautious of the design in terms of layout, typography, text colours and theme in order to create a website for vision and colour blind disabilities. Most of the website that people nowadays brows has a very straightforward design, so why not creating a slightly more graphical and at the same time under control of the accessibility guideline. The different web disabilities with a conclusion will be discussed in this essay.

There are four types of disabilities

• Visual

Blindness, low vision, colour-blindness

• Hearing

Deafness

• Motor

Inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control

• Cognitive

This can be defined as difficulty in distractibility, and inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information. Developers should write as simply and clearly as possible, also short, simple, unmistakable phrases are easier to understand than long, difficult, unclear ones. People with more deep cognitive disabilities need sentences that are particularly short, simple, and unmistakable.

Three differnet typs of vision:

• Blindness
• Low Vision
• Colour-blindness

Blindness

These are group of people who are blind and are not able to see things. They cannot use the World Wide Web; therefore, Screen reader device should be used instead.

Low Vision

This is when the person’s vision cannot be fully corrected by glasses; low vision is more common among the elderly, but it can occur in individuals of any age as a result of different conditions as macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic. These conditions cause different types of effects in a person's vision.

Different types of low vision

• Macular degeneration

The macula is near the centre of the retina, which is the area in the back of the eye. The central area of view is affected the most, making it difficult to see objects that the person is looking at directly. Blur central vision and sometimes text can appear broken and unclear.

• Glaucoma

Glaucoma result is often the opposite of the effect of macular degeneration; it can be mainly difficult to read text because text seems faded as well as blurry.

• Diabetic retinopathy

The results are dark patches in the field of vision where the leaks occur. Text can appear blurred or distorted in these regions.

• Contract

Results are blurred or unclear effect, especially in bright light and text can appear to fade into the background.

Low vision Conclusion

We should check the website in all resolutions and also select the best font sizes for the people with low vision problem and also try not to make pages lengthy. The testing shows that most of elderly people do not like plenty of contents in a single page, therefore, spreading some of the contents into multiple pages can be useful. People with cognitive disabilities have a difficulty to read texts in long pages, the jQuery pagination cane the solution to this problem. Try to create the texts in real texts so users can enlarge the passage and never apply many graphical texts. In my point of view, it is very useful to create the optional resizable text more similar to screen magnifier which gives the users with vision disabilities the ability to resize the texts. I have designed the resizable option for text by jQuery technique in this project, which means texts can be resized in any font size. The screen magnifier is the software programme designed for this purpose; this is a software program that zooms in on a small area of the screen, allowing people with low vision to see it more clearly. The website which I have designed apart from the logo and heading all pages are resizable even the navigation.

Colour-blindness

The colour blindness are group of people which they cannot see the difference between certain colour combinations. The colours with which they have difficulty distinguishing depend upon their type of colour-blindness, but red-green deficiencies are the most common ones.

• red-green deficiencies

It does not mean that these people cannot see reds or greens they simply have a harder time differentiating between them. Red-green deficiencies divided in two sections: Protanopia and protanomaly (red deficiencies) and Deuteranopia and deuteranomaly (green deficiencies) The colour of red tends to look darker Deuteranopia and deuteranomaly are the most common forms of colour-blindness. They cannot see reds and greens in the same way that colour-normal people can, they can often distinguish between the shades of reds and greens relatively accurately.

• Protanopia and protanomaly (red deficiencies)

Reds appear to be somewhat darker than they actually are and the greens tend to look similar to the reds. Protanomaly is milder than protanopia, but at the end the result is similar. Also in lots of cases prove that people with protanomaly can distinguish some reds and greens.

• Deuteranopia and deuteranomaly (green deficiencies)

Deuteranopia and deuteranomaly are the most common forms of colour-blindness. They cannot see reds and greens in the same way that colour-normal people can. The Deuteranomaly is the less serious of the two conditions. Although individuals with deuteranomaly probably cannot see reds and greens in the same way that colour-normal people can, they can often differentiate between the shades of reds and greens relatively perfectly.

Other deficiencies: Tritanopia (Blue) – This is much less common. In general blues and greens can be confused, the colour of yellow is also affected and they seem to disappear or appear as lighter shades of red. Rod monochromacy or achromacy (no colour): This group constitutes an extremely small minority among people who are colour-blind. For these group is a world of black, white, and shades of gray.

Colour-blindness conclusion

We do not need to change the whole graphic of website or make it black and white; you can use one of the solutions such as creating theme switcher. The theme switcher is an optional choice for visitors to change the background of the website as well as colour of the text. Another solution is all the pictures in the website created in alt tag and name and title the links. In this website I have created three different themes, black and white for rod monocharomacy (no colour), these are the group of people who cannot distinguish colours. Colours green and red were not used in this website and also the best practice is to validate all HTML and CSS and to check the website with online accessibility check.

Thanks for printing and browsing Disabilities and the Web